History News

On September 28 the University hosts Dr. Benjamin Hoy, a Guelph History BA grad and Stanford PhD who is now a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan. He returns to Guelph to give the Cassidy-Reid Lecture. This lectureship was established in honour of retired History faculty Dr Keith Cassidy and Dr Richard Reid and is held every two years.

Dr. Hoy, a celebrated young scholar, is also the son of two retired English professors, Helen Hoy and Thomas King, and is one of the country's youngest and most promising scholars of aboriginal history.

Please join us:

An abundance of career options

Liberal arts graduates pursue many different career paths. For example, almost 40,000 employed Canadians have a bachelor’s degree in history. Of that group, 18 percent work in management occupations and 23 percent work in business, finance and administrative positions (Statistics Canada, National Household Survey, 2011).  View the full report on Universities Canada's website.

At the Canadian Historical Association Awards ceremony in May our new Aboriginal historian, Brittany Luby, received the John Bullen prize for the best dissertation defended in the last year. Our Graduate Chair, Matthew Hayday, won the prize for the best article published in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association.

Congratulations from all of us!

Canada made marijuana illegal 94 years ago and no one's sure why

Ninety-four years ago Canada became one of the first countries to ban a substance virtually no one was using. A University of Guelph professor who penned a book on the history of illegal drugs in Canada says after nearly a century of marijuana prohibition, no one is really sure why it was made illegal in the first place.

"We don't actually know," Dr. Catherine Carstairs told The Morning Edition host Craig Norris Tuesday.

On March 30th, the Rural History Round Table wrapped up another successful season with Dr. Sasha Mullally, associate professor of history at the University of New Brunswick. Dr. Mullally's talk: "The Heroics and Poetics of Interwar Medicine" deconstructed the "country doctor" icon by examining stories about rural doctors which have been published overtime. Focusing on doctors practicing in Maine and Nova Scotia, Mullally separated the myth from the reality.

The Rural History Roundtable returns in September. See you then!

The Canadian Culinary History Exhibit opens April 7 in McLaughlin Library on the University of Guelph main campus. All are welcome to attend the opening!

From Guelph Today:

Cooks are an essential bridge between farmers and consumers, and always have been.

Today, our former Post-Doctoral Researcher, Dr. Ian Mosby, is featured in the Globe and Mail: "We Are What We Ate: Canada’s History in Cuisines"

Our Fall 2017 topics for Invitation to History First Year Seminars have been announced!

Dr. Alan Gordon: "Polar Encounters"
Dr. James Fraser: "The Celts"

For more information visit our First Year Courses page (scroll down to HIST*1050, Invitation to History)

Perspectives on Canada 150: Do We All Have Reason to Celebrate?

What if the country threw a party, but not everyone saw a reason to celebrate?

This year will bring numerous official events to mark the sesquicentennial of Confederation in Canada.

University of Guelph professor Kim Anderson says many Canadians have reason to throw themselves a 150th birthday party in 2017— even if only to celebrate the perennial anti-fact of not being American, particularly in the new Trump era.

Today historian of the United States, Dr. Susan Nance is interviewed in the L. A. Times about the announcement last weekend that Feld Entertainment, owner of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth Circus, is shutting the show down after over 150 in the business.